The day Return became Enter (2023)

I'd claim that the article draws its own wrong conclusions.

The key was not renamed. On the IBM PC, the key got overloaded with two functions.

The IBM PC keyboard was preceded by larger keyboards with the same mechanism, style and font for use with IBM's terminals. Those had two separate keys for ↵ and Enter.

The ↵ symbol was the Return symbol signifying the Return function. The textual legend "Enter" signified the Enter function, for data entry.

Some early Model F XT keyboards did not have stabilised keys so the touch-area had to be 1×1 with room only for ↵. From the Mode F AT (large backwards-L key) forwards however, the key did have both legends: ↵ and Enter. From there on, "Enter" is mostly just what IBM PC users called it.

There are other common misconceptions about key legends. For example that ↹ would mean Tab, when it is two symbols: ⇥ for Tab and ⇤ for Back-Tab. Back-tab is on the top because it is activated with Shift. (And again, some IBM terminal keyboards had separate Tab and Back-Tab keys. Apple keyboards have only the ⇥ symbol, BTW.)

Then the whole CRLF vs CR vs LF for line endings in files would have been totally avoided, with CR returning the print-head/cursor to the left-most position (right-most on R-L languages) and LF literally moving the print-head/cursor down.

The drivers for the particular terminal could have translated as required, and we would not need (in 2025!) to be specifying to git and elsewhere what to convert line endings to/from.

I know that back in the days of literal TTYs (ASR-33) where I cut my teeth, the BEL/BS/SP/CR/LF/FF etc characters were literally controlling a print head, but even then it didn't make much sense that we didn't have internal representation of what was needed (field separator, group separator, record separator) that was translated when doing actual I/O to a physical device.

One thing the article doesn't mention is that some of the old teletypewriters were so slow that you could not be guaranteed that you would get the carriage to the start of the line by using only one Enter character, so it was mandatory to use two.

This meant that all linefeeds consisted of the following characters: CR CR LF (two carriage returns followed by one linefeed). Even in the time where most of the equipment were modern and didn't really need this, you couldn't know if somebody somewhere still had an old teletype running. So this was mandatory and part of the standard.

On mainframes there is also a distinction between Return and Enter. As far as I remember there was a soft return, which only moved the cursor down. And there was a hard return, which acted as Send - thereby transmitting your screen to the mainframe.

Something similar can be used on modern computers. Here is an example in Excel: If you edit a cell (with F2) you can end the edit by using Enter. But if you have enabled to wrap text you can use Alt+Enter to just input a linefeed without exiting the editor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enter_key#/media/File%3AEnte...

It's ironic that, though we haven't seen a Return key for a long time, the down-left arrow symbol still used on many keyboards represents the motion of a carriage return. I guess there's no other symbol that would convey the meaning of Enter as well.

Even then I assume it was really a troll as much as anything else.

I was a little surprised the Space Cadet keyboard didn't come up, but I guess this is an article about the return/enter key and not various modifier keys.

> There was no day, no single event when Return became Enter

Oh, never mind then...

Could've just titled it "The history of how Return became Enter" or "How Return became Enter"

Enter is for IBM 3278 style where a "screenful" or form of inputs is buffered by the terminal and sent as a whole when the user presses enter or send. Fewer interrupts and context switches at the mainframe. Required even its own ssh client. Return key exists, too, and can be part of the buffered data record.

In practice the enter term leaked into the character-based world.

That said, it misses a key ancestor: the original Macintosh Keyboard (M0110). It had a Return key AND an Enter key in the bottom row, to the right of the spacebar and next to the Option key.

There was Command key on the left only, which seems to mark the evolution from the “Open Apple” and “Closed Apple” keys. If I recall correctly, Return was intended for typing, while Enter was used for GUI interaction, but I’m not entirely sure.

Even into the 2000s, laptops were still figuring things out. I had a 12-inch PowerBook G4 with two keys labeled “Enter”:

- One accessible via Fn + Return - One as its own key in the bottom row, next to the right Command key

This layout meant it only had one Option key. It also featured a lockable numpad layer, so having a standalone Enter key made less sense to me. Unless it was meant for spreadsheet number crunchers? Or there was still that typing/GUI distinction in Mac OS 9 somewhere?

Also, the text is nicely readable but none of the images are viewable.

I wonder if this is quite correct?

This Teletype use Baudot code, not ASCII, as reflected by the keyboard including LTRS and FIGS keys. Baudot was only a 5 bit code, so in order to be able to represent/transmit more characters than 5 bits would allow, it used the LTRS (letters) and FIGS (figures) codes to select different character sets (cf ASCII SI & SO), which the receiving system would then need to keep track of.

Apparently the convention was to send the sequence "CR LF LTRS LTRS" to both advance to next line and select the letters character set, with sending the semantically redundant double "LTRS LTRS", giving the receiving teletype enough time to complete the preceding mechanical movements (CR, LF). Given this, it seems that keeping LF distinct from a combined CR+LF operation wasn't needed for timing considerations - one could have just sent as many LTRS as needed.

I wonder was there perhaps a use case for LF without CR with the old Teletypes, or perhaps keeping them separate was just due to the simple mechanical nature of these devices and the different mechanical operations needed to perform CR vs LF ?

in CR LF, the LF being there to account for timing as its tolerant of the return process still being in progress is genius.

If applications followed the UI guidelines, Enter behaved like Return if enter didn’t make sense in the context and vice versa. Yes, that was mostly (when do you have UI to enter a multi-line text to be processed as a separate unit?) but when it mattered, return started a new line, and enter sent entered text to be processed by the application.

MPW shell was a (?the?) prime example. In its editor, Return started a new line, Enter executed the current selection or, if there was none, line.

When Apple introduced the Macintosh II, buyers had the option to get a keyboard with the Macintosh layout, or the larger Apple Extended Keyboard with a mixed Macintosh/IBM PC layout.

The Apple Extended Keyboard was intended to be used with a IBM PC in a card slot. That is why it has a layout like a IBM Model M with two Control keys. It also has some sublegends that are PC-specific and otherwise didn't make sense on Macintosh.

But this keyboard got popular, and influenced its successors.

Ive been finally learning a bit of Linux shell stuff and was disappointed when I realized that shells generally don't follow this paradigm unlike PowerShell consoles on Windows.

https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/server/api/core/bitst...

Why not “Sure”?

I wonder if hat word processors would have used a separate Enter (or Go!) for?

“Manual hyphenation was not ad-

vised, either”

It is a very common older model iPhone, so I wonder if they lined that up on purpose. Brilliant, if so. It isn’t a manual hyphen, it just so happens to hit there.